What can you do in an hour?

Why an hour? Because it’s a chunk of time I often have. In the mornings, after I make my son’s lunch and tidy up the kitchen, it’s about an hour before he heads off to the school bus and I get down to work for the day. In the evening, it’s about an hour between when I get my daughter to bed and when I need to get my son to bed. After that, it may be one or two hours before I head to bed. Just as some examples. And, of course, there are all those hours on the weekend that might get ignored and frittered away.

In an hour, I can . . .

Hand piece one quarter of a quilt block.

Index 5-15 pages (depending on the text).

Write 1,500 words.

Read 2 or 3 chapters in a book (been a while since I timed my reading, so this is a WAG).

Weed and mulch a flower bed.

Do the week’s grocery shopping.

Cook and serve dinner, maybe even squeeze in the clean-up.

Watch an video lecture for an online class or do the associated homework so I’ve got deeper background for future stories.

Go for a run, then stretch and shower afterward.

Read a stack of books with my daughter.

Go outside and blow bubbles and draw with sidewalk chalk with both of my kids.

Bake a batch of cookies.

Clean all 3 of the bathrooms.

Play cribbage with my son.

Pay bills and clean clutter off the table where they’ve been stacked.

Or

Watch an episode of an SF show on Netflix with my husband (We went through the new Battlestar Galactica earlier this year, and Netflix has various flavors of Star Trek as well, for example.), possibly plus an episode of a comedy like Arrested Development.

Sometimes, it’s not an hour; I only have 15 or 20 minutes — but I can still get a chunk of a lot of these done.

2 Comments

Recently the only thing I’ve wanted to do with a free hour is futz about on the computer doing nothing in particular… but your list is a good one and reminds us all just how much can get done in a short time.

Oh, I hear you. This list as to remind me, too — I certainly could’ve put down the number of games of Bejeweled Blitz I could play, or the amount of reading Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ I could do, or . . . Sometimes, we need the mental break of NOT making ourselves do something productive.